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My work now has Microsoft Lync, an instant messaging system intended for internal communications. It’s an alternative to inter-office mail, e-mail, fax, telephone or walking down the hall to talk to somebody at their desk.

Why do we need it another form of internal communication? E-mail is retained on servers which costs money, and retained e-mails are discoverable in lawsuits. Instant messages won’t tie up storage space on servers (which will save money) and won’t be discoverable in litigation.

Except . . . we’re government. EVERYTHING we do should be discoverable, that’s the point of Sunshine Laws. And if we don’t want to pay to store e-mail, then don’t store it – establish a retention policy and delete everything after a short time.

Joe Doakes

At my most recent employer, every Lync session started with a notice that *everything* you wrote and presented was being recorded.

Pretend for a minute that President Obama doesn’t believe the United States ought to be a superpower, that it ought to be equal with other nations (not a big stretch – that belief motivated the Atom Spies to give nuclear secrets to the Russians and no doubt is shared by billions of people worldwide, today). How would he go about bringing America down to second or even third-world levels following the model of, say, Argentina?

Six months ago, as South Korea exported steel to the US at prices below what union steelworkers could produce it here, Liberals decried “dumping” and imposed import taxes to level the playing field, thereby protecting American jobs and prosperity.

Now that the Saudis are actively trying to kill the North Dakota oil industry by dumping crude oil at below-cost-of-production prices, Liberals are conspicuously silent.

It’s almost as if Liberals WANT to destroy America’s energy industry, to KEEP us dependent on foreign oil, to RAISE gas prices to $5 per gallon.

It’s no wonder that the White House and its allies aren’t citing the recent elections or polls in defending their actions. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken ahead of Obama’s move found that voters opposed him taking executive action without approval from Congress by 48 to 38 percent. Even among Hispanics, only 43 percent favored the action versus 37 percent who opposed it.

Look for this to be as far as the media (AKA “The Praetorian Guard”) to go in criticizing Barack Rex.

The nation’s problems have been solved. They must be, if the Feds have nothing left to investigate besides painkiller use in the NFL to make sure million-dollar superstars aren’t taking drugs to help them win by playing while hurt.

I notice they didn’t investigate the Vikings. Nobody playing there, hurt or not.

An activist with the Mali Marvin campaign (running against Deb Hillstrom in Brooklyn Center) provided an account on Facebook about the obstruction every Republican activist in a DFL town knows first-hand (included in full below):

In Houston last summer, the Democrat-run government passed an “anti-discrimination” ordinance which, like most such ordinances, did little about discrimination but did sodomize freedom of association. It was opposed by a variety of religious groups, for a variety of reasons.

But that was just the warmup.

Perhaps inspired by Barack Obama’s siccing of the IRS against dissenters, Houston’s Democrat-run city government is looking for payback against dissenters; it’s subpoenaing ministers’ sermons from the run-up to the vote for the ordinance.

That’s subpoenaing; not just sternly asking:

The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.

“The city’s subpoena of sermons and other pastoral communications is both needless and unprecedented,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christina Holcomb said in a statement. “The city council and its attorneys are engaging in an inquisition designed to stifle any critique of its actions.”

ADF, a nationally-known law firm specializing in religious liberty cases, is representing five Houston pastors. They filed a motion in Harris County court to stop the subpoenas arguing they are “overbroad, unduly burdensome, harassing, and vexatious.”

Dear Wisconsin “Jon Doe” prosecutors; I take it back. You are no longer the most corrupt pettifoggers south of the Fed.

And this is not an aberration. This is every Democrat, everywhere in the country. Oh, they make nice noises about “liberties” like making dung statues of the Virgin Mary and waving their genitals around in public; but when it comes to the real ones, speech (by people not favored by the ACLU’s ministrations, meaning people from flyoverland in general), assembly, association, the fruits of ones labor, self-defense, self-determination?

If your local Democrats haven’t sicced the IRS, or a prosecutor, or their county attorney, on you yet, it’s just that they haven’t had a clear opportunity yet.

“The American people don’t want me just standing around twiddling my thumbs and waiting for Congress to get something done,” Obama said.

Well, yes, Mr. President; if Congress doesn’t pass legislation, those of us who understand the Constitution, especially the bit about “separation of powers”, most certainly do want you to go golfing, rather than usurp the role of Congress.

In her first act as the newly elected senior board President, Merchant waited until the last minute to unveil sweeping changes to board policy that eliminates any guarantees of public input into school board meetings as what can only be seen as a prelude to eliminating entirely any public involvement in school board meetings.

Beset by criticism over an unfolding story of corruption and incompetence on its watch, and infighting among its own members, the New Rochelle Board of Education last night proposed to “solve” that problem by severely curtailing public engagement during school board meetings.

Like most people of my generation, I was brought up to respect and trust the police.

Of course, conservatism is about enduring social orders, and, when absolutely necessary and when nothing else will work, applying judicious force to protect that order against those that would harm, rob or swindle others, within the boundaries of fair, just laws on which there was broad consensus.

But conservatism is also about limited government – the proverbial good government that governs least.

And it says impossible to miss as it is troubling to notice that nearly every day seems to bring another story of grotesque police overreach; of swat teams barging into the wrong house, shooting dogs and handcuffing people and terrorizing children (or, in one recent case, burning and disfiguring them with Military grade flash bang grenades) only to find that it’s the wrong address (and then tearing the place apart to find something, anything illegal to justify the raid, and still leaving the homeowners to pay for the damages; “rogue” cops trampling all over citizens rights.

On the one hand, criticizing the police goes against conservatives’ DNA, in some ways; it is a difficult and necessary job.

On the other hand, or the past 20 years the police have been getting more and more powerful – and, with the blessing of not a few courts that seem to forgotten what the Constitution was for, made the 4th amendment almost as meaningless as the 10th.

And criticizing the heavy handedness of the police doesn’t come without blowback; you can usually count on a few responses almost immediately:

“You could never do the job” – other than “reading addresses correctly” and knowing the difference between a dangerous dog and family pet barking to protect his family, you’re probably right. That’s why I pay taxes for the police department. As employees. Not feudal lords and masters.

“Without police, society would be overrun with criminals!” – For starters, it’s a strawman; nobody’s talking about getting rid of the police. Again, I pay taxes, in part, for a police force. As employees, to keep the order – not like medieval knights to whom I, the mere citizen, must bow and scrape.

“What’s the matter? If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from the police. Maybe you have something to hide…” – I’m not saying that people who say this with a straight, unironic face want a dictatorial police state. I’m just saying that dictatorial police states need lots of people who think this kind of idiocy to have a chance to take root. And in a society is overrun with rules and regulations as ours is, I think it’s fairly safe to say that absolutely no one hasn’t broken some sort of law.

“You can’t blame the police for wanting to come home alive at the end of the shift” – Absolutely. And watching the way the police sprayed fire at innocent civilians during the manhunt for rogue cop Christopher Dornan in California two years ago, or watching police wound nine people – none of them the perpetrator – chasing a shooter around the Empire State building in New York City, you can’t blame me for wanting to do the same.

He starts with the obligatory disclaimer – although that’s not enough to forestall some of the knee-jerk reactions he gets his comments section:

Let’s get the obligatory disclaimer out of the way: Yes, many police officers do heroic works and, yes, many are upstanding individuals who serve the community bravely and capably.

But respecting good police work means being willing to speak out against civil-liberties-breaking thugs who shrug their shoulders after brutalizing citizens.

Read the whole thing.

Delgado points out that, but some statistical measures, police are actually better behaved than they used to be. And in an era where everyone has a cell phone with a video camera, it’s getting harder and harder for police to misbehave.

On the other hand, now that local police forces are running around with SWAT teams decks out in better battle rattle than the local National Guard unit, the stakes are even higher than they used to be.

Krugman says the rich sock their money in low-yield bonds. But he fails to consider the obvious. Stocks have almost tripled since March 2009. Urban real estate is in a boom. Art is in a boom. If you believe Krugman, it must be the poor folks who are feeding these asset bubbles. Because the rich, Krugman says, are stuck in low-yield bonds.

This is utter nonsense. The excess liquidity created by U.S. monetary policy does not wind up in the hands of the poor. It winds up in the hands of the rich. The rich then put it into stocks, real estate, hedge funds, and art.

It’s actually the poor and lower middle classes whose wealth — such as it is –lies fallow in no-interest bank accounts (or wealth-eroding cash if they have no bank account at all). It’s not the rich, but middle-class retirees that try to eke out a living on low-yield interest rates.

Krugman has it exactly, 180-degrees wrong. Cheap money is a transfer payment to the rich. It is a tax on the poor. The rich-poor divide grew vast under the cheap money policies of Ben Bernanke. This trend will surely accelerate under Janet Yellen.

Wonder what it’ll be like, someday – maybe decades from now, maybe in the afterlife – when “progressives” realize they’ve been squeeeeeing like a bunch of teenager grrrls at a One Direction concert over the permanent destruction of the middle class.

In the past, I’ve “joked” that anyone with an Ivy League degree should be disqualified from “public service”.

It’s a “joke” – I keep using the scare quotes, because it’s only barely a joke – because over-educated fools have First Amendment rights, too.

But to paraphrase Dennis Prager, it takes years of the “finest” education this country offers to make someone as ill-informed as Representative Ryan Winkler, who represents west-metro Saint Louis Park.

Winkler – known to many on and off Capitol Hill as “The Eddie Haskell Of The Legislature” – rocketed to national fame last year by calling Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom”, after which the Harvard-educated legislator pled ignorance that it was considered a racist insult.

This week? Big strong Harvard lawyer Ryan Winkler needs to tell those dumb widdle wimmins who watch babies and change bedpans all day how to run their businesses. This from Twitter on Monday, in re the SCOTUS decision on childcare provider unionization:

@RepRyanWinkler: Union organizing is our best hope for equal pay for women and creating living wage jobs. Five activists on the Supreme Court can’t stop it.

Bear in mind, Winkler is speaking about unionizing daycare and home care providers – people (largely but not entirely women) who have created their own living wage jobs,with pay that varies but is enough to keep a lot of people doing the work for years and years; nobody gets drafted into the daycare business, right?

@RepRyanWinkler: @nwlaroche Unions raise wages. Dues are a small fraction of the financial benefit unions provide. Childcare activists are foolish.

I’ll just let that quote rattle around on its own for a bit. “Childcare activists are foolish”, says the Harvard-trained lawyer.

Of course, I sat through those hearings, and talked with those providers; the unions provide no “benefit” to providers whatsoever.

They don’t “negotiate for better salaries” for the workers, because the workers are contractors working directly for families and patients. There will be no union rep sitting in on the meetings between parents and the daycare providers!

They don’t “provide” any “training” for the providers that they’re not required by state law to provide themselves already to keep their licenses.

They don’t deal with work conditions, because those are already part of their state licensing conditions.

Because it won’t just be “child care providers?” Because the unions have been organizing ringers, people who aren’t licensed providers but who will vote to unionize. All the DFL’s talk about “letting providers vote” is a sham. Again – either Winkler is ignorant, or he’s lying.

@RepRyanWinkler: @nwlaroche Nothing stops them from running their business, they get to decide on and run a union, and negotiate higher rates. Good deal.

They already negotiate their rates (and they’re already high; Minnesota has some of the highest daycare costs in the country). They don’t get to “run” any union; Javier Morillo (of AFSCME) and Elliot Seid (of the SEIU) do. And while they will have nothing to do with “negotiating” the “rates” that the providers charge, they will be right there collecting those dues, and kicking $2 million a year of them back to the DFL, with Ryan Winkler being a recipient.

Winkler and the DFL expect you, the voter, especially the female voter who is most likely to be working in home daycare or personal care, are too stupid to know any better.

On the one hand? It’s just Eddie Haskell Ryan Winkler. Nobody who’s political brain isn’t on autopilot – like, apparently, the DFL voters in his district – takes him all that seriously.

But of the autopilot set? Winkler is clearly being groomed by the DFL for bigger and better things (or was, until the “Uncle Tom” flap – and the media has buried that story effectively enough for the DFL to start easing Winkler back into the spotlight).

But does the DFL want to identify with this sort of paternalistic sexism?

I gave myself a chuckle, there. All sins are forgiven the DFL True Believer.

Unionization will create not one single daycare job; it will raise no personal care attendant’s pay; it will improve not a single working care provider’s working conditions. Not one.

That’s a necessary step, and the request should be expediently heeded by the Obama administration. Although there are two investigations underway in the Republican-controlled House, a nonpartisan review by an investigator with bipartisan respect and technological expertise is sorely needed. The public needs reassurance that the nation’s tax-collection agency is run with integrity and that anyone who may have abused its formidable authority has been held accountable.

So far, so good.

But then we swerve into the weeds:

The decision on whether to appoint a special prosecutor, officially called a special counsel, lies with the Department of Justice.

That’s long for Eric Holder. The guy who’s been stonewalling several other investigations of Obama administration corruption, Fast and Furious chief among them.

IRS officials have insisted that the lost e-mails were just an unfortunate computer meltdown and that the extra scrutiny of groups with “Tea Party” and “Patriots” in their names was a regrettable mistake. If this is trumped-up, as Democrats often and sometimes accurately deride other House investigations, there’s nothing to fear by appointing a special prosecutor to put this long-simmering scandal to bed.

Or – as Holder will do – whitewash it.

Still – while the Strib’s editorial board exhibits its inner pollyanna about the DOJ’s inner gestalt, at least it’s heart is in the right place, kind of:

It’s foolish to think this is going to blow over — or that it should. A May 2013 report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration unequivocally concluded that the agency used “inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions.’’…a thorough reading of the report underscores that conservative groups were targeted.

The real question is: can we, The People, trust an Obama Administration appointee to police his boss?

There was a time we could count on the media to ensure someone like Holder’s behavior would be above board.

The government puts people on no-fly lists without explanation or recourse. They must, or the terrorists will win. Now some namby-pamby bleeding heart Liberal federal judge has gone all 18th Century on Homeland Security, insisting on dredging up obsolete concepts of Due Process from some Amendment to some dusty old paper written by White Male Slave Holders. Of course, you’d know she was appointed to the federal bench by that noted right-wing kook, Bill Clinton.

The really sad part? It took a bunch of Muslim terrorists-pretending-to-be-plaintiffs to get this result. If you or I had sued for it, we’d have been shut down in a heartbeat.

Still, this is a start. The Light Bringer can assassinate citizens without recourse or oversight. And target groups for their politics. And import illegal immigrants at will. But now he has to tell us why we can’t fly.

Joe Doakes

To be fair? Our various enemies are the only people Democrats ever learn anything from.

That Abramski’s reading does not render the Act’s requirements “meaningless” is further evidenced by the fact that, for decades, even ATF itself did not read the statute to criminalize conduct like Abramski’s. After Congress passed the Act in 1968, ATF’s initial position was that the Act did not prohibit the sale of a gun to an eligible buyer acting on behalf of a third party (even an ineligible one). See Hearings Before the Subcommittee To Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 1, 118 (1975).A few years later, ATF modified its position and asserted that the Act did not “prohibit a dealer from making a sale to a person who is actually purchasing the firearm for another person” unless the other person was “prohibited from receiving or possessing a firearm,” in which case the dealer could be guilty of “unlawfully aiding the prohibited person’s own violation.” ATF, Industry Circular 79–10(1979), in (Your Guide To) Federal Firearms Regulation1988–89 (1988), p. 78. The agency appears not to have adopted its current position until the early 1990’s. See United States v. Polk, 118 F. 3d 286, 295, n. 7 (CA5 1997).

The majority deems this enforcement history “not relevant” because the Government’s reading of a criminal statute is not entitled to deference. Ante, at 22. But the fact that the agency charged with enforcing the Act read it, over a period of roughly 25 years, not to apply to the type of conduct at issue here is powerful evidence that interpreting the Act in that way is natural and reasonable and does not make its requirements “meaningless.”

“Even if the statute were wrongly thought to be ambigu­ous on this point, the rule of lenity would defeat the Gov­ernment’s construction. It is a “familiar principle” that “‘ambiguity concerning the ambit of criminal statutes should be resolved in favor of lenity.’” Skilling v. United States, 561 U. S. 358, 410 (2010). That principle prevents us from giving the words of a criminal statute “a meaning that is different from [their] ordinary, accepted meaning, and that disfavors the defendant.” Burrage v.United States, 571 U. S. ___, ___ (2014) (slip op., at 12). And it means that when a criminal statute has two possible readings, we do not “‘choose the harsher alternative’” unless Congress has “‘spoken in language that is clear and definite.’” United States v. Bass, 404 U. S. 336, 347–349 (1971). For the reasons given above, it cannot be said that the statute unambiguously commands the Government’s current reading. It is especially contrary to sound practice to give this criminal statute a meaning that the Govern­ment itself rejected for years.”

I wasn’t aware the government had reversed its interpretation of the statute and I never heard of a rule of lenity. But the dissent makes sense to me.

Joe Doakes

Further proof that:

We have too many laws

The fact that our laws are enforced, not enforced, or overeenforced at the discretion of government according to political priorities is a sign that your government is becoming more lawless, and merely turning into the gang with the coolest guns.

Sandy Springs, Georgia has, for the past nine years, privatized just about every facet of government:

To grasp how unusual this is, consider what Sandy Springs does not have. It does not have a fleet of vehicles for road repair, or a yard where the fleet is parked. It does not have long-term debt. It has no pension obligations. It does not have a city hall, for that matter, if your idea of a city hall is a building owned by the city. Sandy Springs rents.

The town does have a conventional police force and fire department, in part because the insurance premiums for a private company providing those services were deemed prohibitively high. But its 911 dispatch center is operated by a private company, iXP, with headquarters in Cranbury, N.J.

“When it comes to public safety, outsourcing has always been viewed with a kind of suspicion,” says Joseph Estey, who manages the Sandy Springs 911 service in a hushed gray room a few miles from city hall. “What I think really tipped the balance here is that they were outsourcing just about everything else.”

Critics’ response, summarized? “Yeah, but Sandy Springs is wealthy! And white! And privatizing government leads to gated communities!”

Responses?

Sure, it’s wealthy! (And 30% minority). And they get to keep a lot more of that wealth than if they were in a city where government was the biggest for-profit enterprise.

Flint and Detroit were wealthy, too, before successive waves of government and big-union rent-seeking gutted them like deer.

If people decide to vote with their feet and hard-earned money for “gated communities”, that’s more a verdict on government than on them. But it’s irrelevant; Sandy Springs is not a “gated community”; it’s a city that privatized every government function that could be put into a contract.

Mention this in the Twin Cities, of course, and people will recall the Saint Paul suburb that tried to contract out its snow-plowing. According to accounts (written by government union members), it didn’t work well. Of course, the contract – written by those same government workers – didn’t spell out performance standards, or at least spelled them out in a form that befitted a group of unionized city workers, if you catch my drift and I think you do.

You can predict the panic in response:

The prospect of more Sandy Springs-style incorporations concerns people like Evan McKenzie, author of “Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government.” He worries that rich enclaves may decide to become gated communities writ large, walling themselves off from areas that are economically distressed.

“You could get into a ‘two Americas’ scenario here,” he says. “If we allow the more affluent to institutionally isolate themselves, then the poor are supposed to do — what? They’re supposed to have all the poverty and all the social problems and deal with them?”

Evan. Bubbie. Listen up.

In Chicago, the places were Rahm Emanuel and the Obama family live are as safe as a pediatric ICU. Mere blocks away, the streets are shooting galleries. This, in one of the most over-governed, over-bureaucratized cities in the country.